Après Moi
by pseudonymitous
Summary: Set after the S5 finale. The adventures of Auggie and Annie, as they discover that starting over isn't as clean and simple as they expected.
1. Chapter 1

"Got it."

It'd been three months since Auggie Anderson hugged Annie Walker, wished her well, and left her apartment in silence. He didn't take tea. He didn't take coffee. He took his cane and vanished from her life. At first, it hadn't seemed like a permanent arrangement. Didn't he have exit paperwork? Wouldn't Joan rope him back into the agency from time to time? Surely he'd call.

But he didn't.

Ryan McQuaid, on the other hand, did.

"I know how much you like to travel," he said as they cooked dinner in his DC penthouse. "But I didn't want you thinking of work at all tonight."

"I don't always associate travel with work," Annie lied, pulling plates from the cupboard.

"Either way, you're about to do a lot of it," Ryan said, taking a swig of wine before dumping the rest into a sizzling pan. He raised his empty glass. "Cheers to you."

Annie smirked. "Is that what this is about? Just because I didn't take the job with Joan, doesn't mean I'm out of the game."

"Nice try, Walker, but that's hardly what we're celebrating. And go easy on the wine."

The dinner was delicious, the conversation delightful. It wasn't until they were out on the terrace in the cool night air that Ryan cut to the chase.

"If you'll recall, my mouth wrote a hell of a check back in Argentina," he said, flashing her a winning grin.

"I do," Annie felt a smile sneak its way onto her face.

"And you know I'm a man who loves his checks," Ryan continued.

"I do," she repeated.

Ryan wrapped a strong arm around her waist and took a step in her direction, so they were face-to-face. For a brief moment, his eyes darted back and forth, focusing on each of hers, trying to read her thoughts and expressions.

"We aren't conventional people, Annie," he said, his voice soft and deep. "But a woman like you comes along once in a lifetime, if a man is lucky. A partnership like this... it's unbeatable. It's more than I ever thought I'd find."

"Me, too," Annie said softly.

"I know you're scared," he continued. "And you've earned it. We've both lost too many good people. But we're safe now. We're a team. And as far as I can tell, we're lucky as hell. And I wanna run this train right as far as it'll go. Right down the line, no brakes, no nothing."

He meant it. Annie looked up at his face; the serious eyes, the soft lips, the lines from laughing, smiling, spending too much time in the sun. He meant this more than he'd ever meant anything, and he could provide every word of it for her. He had everything to lose, nothing to prove. This was happening. And she loved him, she realized. She'd known for awhile, but now she saw it in every particle of him and she wanted all the things he was promising her.

He reached into his jacket pocket and produced the tiniest of ring boxes.

"This is for you," he said without opening it. "You know the question that comes with it, and it's a one-word conversation."

Annie realized suddenly that for the first time in her life, there was no one else. She'd lost every man she'd cared for before him- Ben, Jai, Scott, Simon, Eyal, Auggie... it ached to think about, but they were all gone. They had nothing to offer her, dead or alive. No future, only a past that hurt her to the marrow. And here was this rugged, reckless, handsome man who took everything she offered and left her fuller in return. As long as she had Ryan McQuaid, she would never be empty.

And so she said yes.


	2. Chapter 2

Auggie intended to call. Maybe write. Email? He could do that, now that he was out of the game, but he knew too much about what the government did and didn't read to ever be comfortable. It felt weird to give everything back: his office, his laptop, his phone. So much of his life was the physical and monetary property of the US government that he started divvying his stuff up by ownership. Turns out Auggie Anderson the civilian didn't have much.

"This is great," Tash proclaimed, standing in the middle of his boxed-up apartment. He could only assume she had her arms outstretched like Julie Andrews in the Alps. "Less stuff means less to worry about. You're free, Auggie."

She wanted to backpack through the Europe first, staying in hostels, maybe hiking The Way.

"You're sure you wanna do The Way with a blind guy?" Auggie asked over Thai takeout.

"I could literally show you The Way," she joked, stealing a spoonful of rice off his plate. "It would be an adventure."

"This whole plan is a pretty big adventure in itself," he said, unable to keep the grin out of his voice. "Maybe we should start small."

"Fine," she snapped back. "When was the last time you went to Rome?"

_Annie went a couple years ago, _he almost responded, then realized how tragic it all sounded.

"I can't tell you the last time I went to Italy," he admitted. "It's been awhile."

"Too long," Natasha said firmly. "I'll book the tickets."


	3. Chapter 3

Annie moved in not long after slipping the ring on her finger. Her newfound free agent status meant a lot of running the Potomac, lounging on Ryan's- now their- sofa, and flipping through bridal magazines that didn't interest her. Annie had always loved fashion. When she first joined the CIA, she was famous for her choices in footwear, for being a girl who knew how to dress well and get what she wanted. She hadn't focused on that sort of thing much since Simon died. Her honeypot days were long behind her.

She'd changed a lot, actually, since her twenties, she realized as she perused an issue of _The Knot. _Gone from a girl who wasn't even licensed to carry a gun to a woman who viewed torture as Plan A. She used to really talk to people, to want to help them out of messes they couldn't control... She wanted the best for others, and she wanted nothing in return, because she was an upstanding citizen, a patriot, an olive branch from the US government.

Then she died.

Every time Annie escaped death, she came back a little harder. A little colder. It was as if she left a piece of herself with the removed bullet, or the healed sutures. A small part of her died, and the rest of her was reincarnated with a tougher shell. The kinds of men who loved her changed, too. She started sleeping with the enemy, and she started to like it. The woman she was five years ago would've made it work with Auggie Anderson. She never would've colluded with Henry Wilcox. She definitely wouldn't have killed him.

She remembered the first time she discharged her weapon, aimed at a human target. She didn't sleep for weeks. She wasn't that girl anymore, she was a soldier. She couldn't think about the life in her victims because she was trained to focus on their wrongdoing. To classify people as "good" and "bad."

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Belenko's words echoed in her mind, and her heart. Oh, her heart. The symptoms showed up, conveniently, while she was off the grid. Her alias work and spycraft were on point in that time, but not in a way that thrilled or intrigued anyone involved. Many myocarditis patients recovered over time, with proper treatment and rest, but Annie hadn't taken care of herself. She hadn't taken care of herself in years, actually.

Naively, she'd asked the doctor if a Pacemaker could help. Surely there was some technology that could manage her condition while she went about her business and focused on other things. But that wasn't how it worked- Pacemakers were designed to keep rhythm. Her heart's rhythm was the least of her worries. Her age put her at high risk for total heart failure, which is essentially what happened every time she had an attack. It was exhausting, managing a condition like this. She started to understand some of Auggie's early frustrations with his own physical limitations. Sometimes life wasn't fair.

Should she tell him about the wedding? He liked Ryan, enough to civilly attend, but Annie didn't know where the hell he was. Ryan was talking about spending a weekend in Istanbul while he met with a client there. Annie wondered if she had a better chance of just waiting there until Auggie showed up, than she did of successfully getting him on the phone.

Wait- Annie stood, and headed for the closet. She pulled open the drawer where she'd tossed her wallets and clutches, and retrieved an old travel billfold. It strapped to her thigh, designed to protect one's personal information in case of a mugging or incident abroad, and she'd kept it close during her first few years with the CIA.

She reached into the tight leather slot- there it was. A business card, still jammed into one of the credit card spaces. Untouched since she'd put it there, shoved behind Russian rubles and a five-pound note.

It was the card Auggie'd given to her, for his private line, years ago at the Agency. It was meant to be a lifeline, a phone entirely disconnected from the CIA. They'd encrypted new phones for communication when she faked her death, so she knew this wasn't that. It was something of his very own, from his little-known private life, and if it still existed, it meant everything now.


	4. Chapter 4

Auggie lay on his side, facing away from Natasha as she booked the plane tickets in bed. Rain splashed softly on the windows, and Tash smelled like pomegranate soap and fresh laundry. Her long fingernails clattered on the keyboard, taking him back to all the other times they'd been exactly here, doing almost exactly this.

Tash fell back into his life in a most unusual way. He'd been crushed when she left him, but she'd left him so many times. She left him intentionally, was tortured against her will, and in his apartment at his insistence. He made the decision to put her first, to place her at the center of his whole future, but was that even what she wanted?

He adjusted the pillows under his head, trying to put the thought out of his mind. She was here now, at a time when she had diplomatic immunity and could very well be doing anything she wanted. That should be enough for him.

"Auggie," she whispered, pushing the laptop aside and wrapping herself around his shoulders.

He pretended to stir. "Yeah?"

"I was thinking," she began excitedly. "Let's skip Rome, and go to Sochi."

"Sochi?" he half-rolled over. "What's there?"

"The sea," she began. "The old Olympic park."

"I don't know if Russia's a great vacation spot right now," Auggie said, feeling her deflate beside him. He could think of a number of reasons, from Putin to Belenko. "Sorry."

"Fine," she snapped with a voice full of ice. "How about Bogotá?"

Auggie remembered his adventures in Colombia. Every inch of the place would taste like Annie whether he liked it or not.

"Pass."

"Well then tell me, Mr. CIA, where you would like to go, since nowhere seems to suit you."

Tash was throwing a tantrum now. Auggie was well-accustomed to her tantrums. They were something he hadn't really missed.

So he sighed, rolled over, and gave in.

"Anywhere you want," he conceded. "Surprise me."


End file.
